For the song "Why Can't I Make You High", Dani Siciliano invited some of her girlfriends over so she could record them slapping their own asses. She wanted them to articulate the sound, and concept, of Slappers, a word that's both the title of Siciliano's second album, and the British slang, roughly equivalent to the American "ho." As the ladies smack their asses, making live counter-rhythm on a strolling, upright bass-assisted song, a derogatory term turns literal, giving Slappers a sharp theme, tongue in check but still articulating the experience of women, and its accompanying institutionalized bullshit. As she explains on a video on her website, Slappers is "a call to arms for women to question how they are presented in this modern world."

Siciliano's work is usually discussed in the context of her husband and collaborator, the electronic musician Matthew Herbert, who samples literally in the fashion of the slapping slappers, with a Dogme 95-influenced conceit that generally translates to conceptual house music and inventive mini-rhythms. Herbert produced Siciliano's debut, Likes…, but while he helps a bit on her second album, here she's generally untethered. Out from under the house trappings that, despite several great moments, sometimes flattened Likes…, Siciliano emphasizes the song, letting her jazz-rooted voice and melody drive this party more than her first album.

Slappers' lyrical and emotional complexities are fuller and more clearly articulated, the sparse literalism of the beats helping inform and refine her lyricism, though Siciliano often deals in "the politics of emotion between people," as she explains Slappers, trafficking in frustration, self-identity, and restlessness. "Why Can't I Make You High", for example, is an anxiety-sufferer's spaghetti western, wherein she and her chorus of girlfriends repeat: "Put yourself down/ Pick yourself up/ Kick it on back/ Put yourself down/ Pick it on up. Put yourself down, you don't need me. I got off of my hands and knees." It feels specifically coded to women, given the context: a paean to the daily life cycle of self-doubt, self-immolation, and grudging reinvigoration.

In an interview video posted on dani-siciliano.com, she looks into the camera and notes, "Yes it's about women. No, it's not a feminist album," without elaborating either way. Yet the work speaks for itself; these days, feminist anger in music is so much subtler than its heyday of the third wave, its former rage and tumult given way to commercial viability and bloated bourgeois fantasy. Offering her realistic perspective on a life that includes issues specific to a woman's experience, Siciliano's upset is extraordinary because it's so day-to-day. And the title track mournfully pleads, "Hey sister. Whoa, sister. Get up off your hands and knees. Show your mind," all on an agitated, wet-sounding collection of clicks and smacks. Sponges, surely.

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If the personal is personal for Siciliano, L.A.-based beatminer/singer Georgia Anne Muldrow imbues many of her off-kiltered/open-windowed sound sketches with the sense of anarchy and rebelliousness that her subjects demand. But Muldrow reworks her rage into a nourishing groove, and while she might be influenced by Nina Simone, the poet Nikki Giovanni, and/or Brazilian jazz singer Flora Purim, and declares on her MySpace page she is a "mad scientist for Garvey," her sound is not locked in the back-ages by her pedigree.

Muldrow's second album, Olesi: Fragments of an Earth, has 21 tracks, many of which never reach the two-minute mark. Their psychedelic, lo-fi layers give them the feel of a whim: Like ideas strike, she punches in, armed with a palette of click tracks, sparse bass, and synth effects. Muldrow's been compared to her Stones Throw compatriot J. Dilla, which is flattering and accurate insofar that both use beats and synths to attain emotional fortitude that doesn't sacrifice bump for sap. But Muldrow's strength is in chiffony harmonies that are twisted a bit by her affection for dissonance. (That might stem from her upbringing: The 22-year-old's father was a musical instrument-maker for Eddie Harris, her mother a former singer for Pharoah Sanders.) Her vocals have a sort of 2001: A Space Odyssey vibe-- "Time revolves around in circles and not squares," sing 15 layers of Muldrow's voice, in unison. "Party over here/ What's that over there?"

Her concepts can need time to ferment, but her visceral poetry-- and refreshing openness-- is alive, and it sparks. Muldrow's songs don't have discernable beginnings or ends and she blankets her own stomping and fingersnaps with an echo effect, which contributes to her music's sense of infinity. Like many music-progressives, she is rooted in and inspired by 70s black politics and its accompanying sense of freedom-- her closest vocal comparisons are Erykah Badu and Jill Scott, but where Badu's butterfly-poet has formal hip-hop loyalties and Scott's jazz impulses are ever more conventional, Muldrow's a hip-hop generation soul singer in the dismal age that gave rise to freak-folk.

Muldrow's no escapist, though: Olesi opens with the devastating "New Orleans", a clanging, cacophonous representation of Katrina. Her voice peeks through colliding bits of piano, drums and what sounds like the hands of a clock. "In the water. There's a family lost underwater. WATER. CAN YOU HEAR ME?" From then she's literally piecing it together, her songs starting and stopping in no discernable fashion like jigsaw parts, which is potentially frustrating in theory-- such free-form throwdowns often require tooth-extracting patience-- but Muldrow's sense of melody and gorgeous voice anchor the shit, even when passing by your ears in stereo like a slow-groove space ride. Her stream-of-consciousness singing acts like a healing salve and an opportunity for new possibilities: Her music, so impervious to structure, represents going out through a window when a door gets shut. And while lyrically she remains a free-form realist, in form she's a kind of Afrofuturist. Or, in her term, "Black Math". As she writes on her MySpace blog, "BLACK MATH MEANS TO CONFIDE IN YO LIFE EXPRESSION CLEARLY AND WITHOUT FAILURE, AND WHEN IT DOES, TO FIND THE SUPREME TEACHING OF OUR ANCESTORS WITH IN EACH AND EVERY STEP OF OUR MISTAKES!... KNOW THIS: SUN IS SHINING. THE SUN SHINE MIGHT NOT BE ON YO FACE. SUN IS SHINING. DARKNESS IS TARGET PRACTICE FOR OUR NEW TECHNOLOGY."

With Muldrow, space isn't an escape so much as a reinvesting of potential. Other songs make a closed space, and with Olesi: Fragments of an Earth, at least in name it's as if she's conjuring another, boundary-less dimension to name home-- her anguish is palpable in its stuttering beats, her voice mourns and yearns, yet at the same time she's piecing together the fragments in an attempt to make it whole, a healing album.

At the end of her prayer "Patience", the mantra "show me the way" breaks into the heartfelt (if vague) chorus, "Show me the way to go/ They're killin' babies in the Bronx/ Revolution's what I want." In Muldrow's music, revolution is waged with gentle life force-- elastic, intimate, fluid, fearless.